FORT MEADE, Maryland — A US military judge convicted Bradley Manning of espionage Tuesday, leaving him facing a lengthy jail term despite clearing him on the most serious charge that he ‘aided the enemy.’

But the big news — and very good news — is that Manning is innocent of the aiding the enemy charge. That ruling averted a potentially catastrophic effect on freedom of speech in this country.

As ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner explained last year, the aiding the enemy charge threatened every single soldier who spoke publicly. “Article 104 is not limited to sensitive or classified information — it prohibits any unauthorized communication or contact with an enemy,” Wizner explained. “So, if the government is right that a soldier ‘indirectly’ aids the enemy when he posts information to which the enemy might have access, then the threat of criminal prosecution hangs over any service member who gives an interview to a reporter, writes a letter to the editor, or posts a blog to the internet.”

Moreover, a charge of “aiding the enemy” is not limited to military figures. Civilians, too, can be charged.

Nor would the charge have been limited to outlets like WikiLeaks. While in its closing arguments, the government tried hard to describe WikiLeaks as different from other news outlets, when asked in a hearing in March whether the government would have charged Manning with “aiding the enemy” had he leaked directly to the New York Times, they said he would.

There is one more significant detail in Lind’s ruling today. In addition to aiding the enemy, the one other charge she found Manning innocent of involved leaking a video of a civilian massacre in Garani, Afghanistan. While Manning admitted accessing the video, the government insisted he had leaked it months before Manning admitted to accessing it (and before forensic evidence showed he had). This claim — one Lind said they did not prove — was key to their claims that Manning had planned to leak to WikiLeaks from the start of his deployment to Iraq.

Thus, while Manning was found guilty on 19 charges, the government’s efforts to use this case to implicate WikiLeaks as a spy suffered a setback with this innocent ruling.

We want to express our deep thanks to David Coombs, who has dedicated three years of his life to serving as lead counsel in Brad’s case. We also want to thank Brad’s Army defense team, Major Thomas Hurley and Captain Joshua Tooman, for their tireless efforts on Brad’s behalf, and Brad’s first defense counsel, Captain Paul Bouchard, who was so helpful to all of us in those early confusing days and first suggested David Coombs as Brad’s counsel. Most of all, we would like to thank the thousands of people who rallied to Brad’s cause, providing financial and emotional support throughout this long and difficult time, especially Jeff Paterson and Courage to Resist and the Bradley Manning Support Network. Their support has allowed a young Army private to defend himself against the full might of not only the US Army but also the US Government.

The government’s theory was that providing defense-related information to an entity that published it for the world to see constituted aiding the enemy because the world includes adversaries, like members of Al Qaeda, who could read the documents online.

Which does seem a little over broad. And by “over broad,” I mean “lunatic, in the same way that Caligula making his horse, Incitatus, Consul, was lunatic.”

About Lambert Strether

Lambert Strether has been blogging, managing online communities, and doing system administration 24/7 since 2003, in Drupal and WordPress. Besides political economy and the political scene, he blogs about rhetoric, software engineering, permaculture, history, literature, local politics, international travel, food, and fixing stuff around the house. The nom de plume “Lambert Strether” comes from Henry James’s The Ambassadors: “Live all you can. It’s a mistake not to.” You can follow him on Twitter at @lambertstrether. http://www.correntewire.com

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73 comments

Marcy Wheeler is wrong for the same reason that Caligula making his horse Incitatus a Senator wasn’t lunatic. Both the Manning prosecution and Senatorship for a horse were about sending messages. Caligula was expressing his contempt for a body which richly deserved it. Obama is all about suppressing any information about government, especially its illegal activities, which he does not control either to keep it hidden or to spin it to his benefit.

It is important to remember that something like 100,000 people had access to the databases which Manning used as well as various foreign governments. So if interested parties, be they foreign intelligence services or terrorist networks, didn’t already have access to this data it was either because they weren’t trying or had no interest in it. As usual, the only people this information was being kept secret from was us, the American public. And Bradley Manning did us a service by restoring it to us just as Obama committed a high crime in withholding it from us.

Hugh, I think the number of people with access to the data Manning handed to WikiLeaks was far more than 100,000. More like millions, at least until State dropped out of the SIPRnet system after the release of the cables. There are probably still several hundred thousand or even a million individuals with access to NIPRnet, SIPRnet, and JWICS.

DoD did little to restrict access to the systems until well after the crucial materials were in the public domain. It was very odd, given how quickly security breaches of this sort are typically handled by government agencies. I’ve seen holes plugged within hours. But it was months before much of anything was done following the War Logs and State Department Cables releases. The Pentagon was almost proud of the Collateral Murder video release.

Manning did a good thing by getting this stuff out to the public, but neither DoD nor State seemed particularly distressed by it. Thus, Manning should not be sentenced to anything close to the maximum possible. Were it up to me, time served would be more than sufficient.

The point of charging Manning is intimidation, not security. Seriously, the ‘other side’ knew all that came out and far more if they’d bothered to look, or just took notes. Manning’s offence was making Very Important People look bad. And this is what Permanent Washington cannot abide, little people thinking for themselves and making high criminals look naked in public by reporting mere truths.

I doubt the Guvmint expected to get the aiding the enemy conviction. The point was to over-charge Manning so that when the judge set aside the obviously bogus indictments that same judge would have pressure to deliver enough convictions to draw a couple of decades in a military prison. Which is what I expect we’ll find Manning draws. Because the idea is to Intimidat the Rest. Anat Kamm is in prison for the same reason, and two-thirds of Pussy Riot for the same reason as well.

It’s not what you do, it’s who you do it to. And those who do it to Very Important People must be made to pay. Neo-feudalism, it’s hour is come.

This sort of attempted intimidation doesn’t work when it’s combined with gross incompetence, as the US government is doing. It just means the next whistleblowers are a lot smarter, and a lot less respectful of the US government.

Like Snowden.

Putin can pull off intimidation because his administration is basically competent. Bush & Obama can’t because they are basically *incompetent*.

These are lessons any Roman, Chinese, or pretty much any Emperor from any period could have explained to our leaders, but our leaders have so much arrogance that they cannot learn from history.

Let him off with a warning and time served. Obama having him tortured* ought to be enough.

NOTE * Yeah, OK, so they never let the UN rapporteur talk to Manning, for some unfathomable reason, so we can’t be sure Manning was tortured within the meaning of the act (so you have it done to you, eh?). What we do know is that what was done to Manning was itself criminal, although as we might expect, the perps have impunity.

Yes, his treatment in prison was shocking, and blatantly illegal too. Under what law? Any! International, national, you name it! Even the military, which believes it makes its own laws, is not legally allowed to torture.

The case should have been dismissed on the basis of this misbehavior alone.

The fact that it wasn’t, and the fact of the torture in the first place, shows that the purpose of this kangaroo show-trial is to intimidate law-abiding Americans and to terrorize them into accepting lawless government.

“Lots of things which are worth doing have occurred to me as I sit calmly here. And among others to write an article on ‘The Duty of Publicity’ -a sort of companion piece to the last one that would really interest me more. You know I have talked to you about the wickedness of people shielding wrongdoers & passing them off (or at least allowing them to pass themselves off) as honest men. some instances of that have presented themselves within a few days which have fired my imagination. If the broad light of day could be let in upon men’s actions, it would purify them as the sun disnfects.” February 26, 1891. Louis Brandeis

Oooh! US Military Justice, we’re all supposed to be in awe. Give me a break. How about the people who lied us into this war, resulting in 100Ks of deaths, and over 45K variously broken servicemen, over 5000 of whom are now dead. This Manning show was just another fantastically stupid move. The rest of the World looks on in wonder at the pathetic lurching of a floundering behemoth.

I agree whole-heartily. It is truly appalling what is happening, how many Americans actually understand what is happening and how we got here. Course it is hard to get to that point when our high-value congress and executive branch are so busy celebrating the vast collection of dead-end part-time retail or service jobs that they are “creating”. The imagery of a floundering… is wonderful.

Which should be protected by the bill of rights, notably the first amendment and freedom of the press. We don’t need freedom of the press just to print things the government wants us to know; we need freedom of the press to ensure that we get a chance to hear things the government doesn’t want us to know. The government can make disclosure of everything a crime and of course doing so guts the first amendment. Jefferson said democracy was dependent on an informed electorate. Well you can kiss democracy goodby if the government can criminalize everything the first amendment guarantees us the right to know.

Too bad that this small man of such big courage was so emotionally confused in his personal life that he felt the need to confide in somebody like Adrian Lamo. Wonder what would have happened if he had never said squat to anyone. Would they have still discovered his identity? or mount any kind of successful prosecution? Or who this have been one of the great unsolved leaks in history? How much better would that have been?! Entire MIC running around unable to solve the case!

Well, it would have been ridiculous to convict Manning of aiding the enemy, since the Pentagon won’t even tell us who our enemies are; that’s secret!

I believe you hit the nail on the head. These people that rule over us thrive on ambiguity (the military industrial complex is thereby guaranteed its gravy train to perpetuity). Manning attracted too much attention. If he were convicted of aiding the enemy, the latter would have to be identified: made finite instead of infinite.

The French had their Dreyfus Affair, then their lost European wars then defeats in Indochina and Algeria. They never learned anything.

The order is a bit shuffled; the lost American war in Korea then another in Vietnam, then two more debacles in the Middle East … then the Manning Affair. As with the French and their delusions, the American fiascoes are all parts of a hubristic whole.

Manning has won his war, the US is embarrassed by an ordinary soldier and an internet connection. Who will defeat the world’s most powerful military next?

It is hard to see how ‘spying for the public’ can be a criminal offense but in La-La Land anything is possible. Next step is for Obama to award himself a medal … something with an ‘O’ in the middle.

Ah, but the French did finally learn something. They realized that they needed to devalue the franc; and then after losing the majority of their empire, the they humbly joined the European Coal and Steel Community, and attempted to improve quality-of-life for their citizens.

When will the US do anything equivalent? Not until after the US empire is clearly gone, I think.

It was a military court-martial. The verdict was decided the instant the charges were brought against him. Thats the way it works. The only question is whether the guilty (note: not the accused, that was before he was charged) will get XX years of hard labor or only X years.

The United States was on life support the second the PATRIOT Act was passed. It died when Obama was elected.

The only reason why it still exists today is entropy.

How ironic that when those who are granted Secret and above clearances are required to swear an oath to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Too bad they never though through the possibilty they’d be in the cross-hairs when the very government they swore to protect itself becomes the enemy.

But the reality is that both the D’s and R’s are in cahoots with each other for power. The last time a third party made any differnece was when The Little Martian (at least that what Imus called him) ran for the Presidency. The result? Clinton-Mr. ‘Repeal Glass-Stegall’ himself.

Need I say more? If you’re any kind of whistle-blower, you can kiss the life you used to know goodbye should you take the first puff. What this says to anyone who sees any kind of malfeasance is to STFU if you value your position in life. When one looks at that POV and compare/constrast that to any kind of religious fundamentalism, I will quote Peter Drucker:

“Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.”

(Then again, If Minnesota could elect Jesse Ventura its governor, maybe there’s hope he might make a run in 2016. Me? I’ll subscribe to the Benny Hill Philosophy of Life (“Live everyday like it’s your last–someday, you’ll be right!”))

It isn’t sure that this was a good ruling for “the country”. It still sends a chilling message to journalists. It still commits a horrific kangaroo judgment against Bradley Manning. He will be in jail for the rest of his life for the crime of revealing illegal behavior. I don’t see the good side.

And as to the acquittal on the charge of aiding the enemy, what good news is that? What freedom of the press or freedom of speech or freedom of assembly do we have now? Huh? Frankly, it would be better to simply declare all journalists and any one who knows journalists and anyone who knows anyone who knows journalists to be traitors and throw the whole country in jail. Then maybe we would fight for something resembling real freedom of speech. Then at least, the truth about our government and our legal system would be out in the open for every one of the three hundred million convicts -1% to see.

As for That ruling averted a potentially catastrophic effect on freedom of speech in this country.

The catastrophic effect has already occurred. The government’s lunatic theories, both on “aiding the enemy” and construing free speech as an offense have already prevailed and been ratified by the Supreme Kangaroo Court in other cases, with other defendants rotting away in prison for their thoughtcrimes.

The child murderer at the top down to Manning’s “judges” are the ones who should be discovering Orange is the New Black. While we should be voting for a Manning-Snowden ticket.

There is a very simple issue here, at some point this soldier agreed to abide by the rules established by the Army. Whether those rules are/were in line with his thinking is meaningless when you agree to follow rules you Agee no other issue. whether those rules are in agreement with others rules is also meaningless he agreed end of story!

“…it was not his place.” A yes, a version of the Nuremberg defense. I believe military code actually obliges opposition to immoral orders. If morality is not the individual soldier’s obligation then it can’t exist in the military.

Soldiers should not be passing along classified information. And even if you argue how classified the data really was, it was not his place. That said, his likely punisment sounds way too harsh. Clearly the administration is attemting to send a signal here.

They should if it would be criminal not to pass it along. Last I checked, soldiers machine gunning civilians from helicopters was a war crime, according to treaties we signed, which are law (assuming, arguendo, that we have the rule of law).

So your solution is to kill the first amendment and freedom of the press? We don’t need freedom of the press just so we can hear things about the government that it wants us to hear. We need freedom of the press so that we can hear what it doesn’t want us to hear. And how are we going to do that if everyone who tells the press something the government doesn’t want us to know gets a 100 years in prison?

We are an ill informed citizenry as it is. Just how dumb do you want he American citizenry to be?

If we want our democracy to survive, we need to find ways to prohibit laws that kill the purpose of freedom of the press.

Yes, we were just meat to be thrown into the grinder, trained to unquestioningly execute orders. The programming which PFC Manning underwent in basic broke down in his case, and I am happy that it did. I find the notion that soldiers are to remain quiet no matter what to be extremely dangerous, both for democracy and for the soldiers’ mental health. PFC Manning served us all much better than a regiment’s worth of unthinking hooah types by not covering up the truth, and now he will be paying a steep price for his service.

Manning is a hero for exposing the lies around he saw around him. He knew he would be crushed and possibly killed for lifting the cover on years of america’s business as usual, but did it anyway. We all swim in the same ocean of lies, but very few will blow the whistle like this young man did.

He will never be the same, and if we are lucky we will not be either. I hope those changes make it out into society far enough to make a discernable change in business as usual.

Perhaps it’s coincidental, but last night I was reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, and one part struck me as relevant to the whole case against Manning. Referring to Stalin’s purges, he said (part 1, p177-8, and the emphasis is his):

It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that “past” which “ought not be stirred up.”

We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. It is for this reason, and not because of the “weakness of indoctrinational work,” that they are growing up “indifferent.” Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity.
It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!”

So Solzhenitsyn suggests that it is the very failure to prosecute officials who were guilty of war crimes that converts these behaviors into institutionally-accepted behavior. That pattern seems to be repeated in a number of different domains – Wall Street comes to mind first, but I’ve seen the same pattern wrt a number of public health issues that have been covered-up. Clearly it’s at work big-time in the State brute squad, given Abu Grahib, Gitmo, torture, rendition, and the daily reports of police repression around the country that is rarely prosecuted.
I suppose this is obvious, that if there’s never any penalty for acting badly, more and more people will act badly. But this war against transparency by Obama is even worse as they are trying to not only remove any possibility for bad actors to be prosecuted, but they are throwing the full force of the federal government (which is funded by our tax dollars), to make sure we citizens never even find out about their war crimes. That’s what this is all about, and the government is in my view completely corrupted and captured. Oh, and also morally (not to mention fiscally) bankrupt.

If only Bradley Manning stood his ground and shot and killed somebody because he was afraid for his life, he would be not guilty. Lesson, when you go to a gun fight with government corruption, come armed with a airline ticket to Moscow Airport.

Be can say he was “very bad” for releasing classified information and “aided the enemy”. Of course he wont touch justifying why a helocopter crew aerosolizing some poor schlubs (read: civilian citizens of a foreign Sovereign nation) should be classified –or clarify how the information iaids an enemy. Ahhh OBL had a copyof the wikileak disclosure! How it aided him? Cant touch that with a bargepole.

Too many secrets that are classified because they are shameful for the not strategic

I’m surprised that the aiding the enemy charges didn’t stick. According to what was reported at the time, Manning/Wikileaks released a lot of tactical intel that clearly named NATO/American collaborators in the Af-Pak theater of operations. Surely this resulted in the Taliban putting a bullet through the head of whatever sources that were named through this public disclosure. With lethal retaliation against any family members of those individuals a distinct possibility.

Unlike Snowden who apparently just compromised systems/methods, Manning/Wikileaks undoubtedly compromised people and got them killed. Of course I can’t say for sure. I didn’t download and look through any of the Wikileaks data that was made available. Individual possession of such information would probably constitute at least a half a dozen violations of the Espionage Act by itself. I have to wonder though if that information won’t eventually come out after the sentencing is finished.

Overall I don’t feel as strongly for the Manning case as much as Snowden. Based upon a cost/benefit analysis of how many people were potentially murdered over the information that was leaked.

It was clear all along that this secret show trial was rigged, but when she read a ruling too quickly to be transcribed that really was the cherry on top. The bogosity of process was so over-the-top that nobody can defend it with a straight face.

A theory: the defense chose to have one judge instead of multiple officers because that one judge would either be more vicious herself, or be more vulnerable to pressure. Because of this, the kangaroo nature of the court is more visible and more vulnerable to challenge. Where instead a bunch of officers would come back with the same verdict, but without the kangaroos all over the place.

In other words, the defense laid a passive-aggressive trap for the unseen forces behind the scenes. And they fell for it.

I have read a few comments and see that most are of the view that Manning’s treatment and prosecution have been overly harsh. What I wish to emphasize is that Pvt. Manning is NOT a criminal of any sort. He is a witness. In the extant case, a witness of war crimes is being persecuted for having the temerity to reveal those crimes to the American and global public. It is not that the prosecution was “reaching” in trying to convict Manning of aiding the enemy, it is that the Administration was identifying the enemy: us.

…. Manning/Wikileaks released a lot of tactical intel that clearly named NATO/American collaborators in the Af-Pak theater of operations. Surely this resulted in the Taliban putting a bullet through the head of whatever sources that were named…. With lethal retaliation against any family members of those individuals …….Of course I can’t say for sure. I didn’t download and look through any of the Wikileaks data that was made available….

Stunning piece of legal scholarship. He was procecuted for diclosing warcrimes that were classified due to the nature of the acts, not for national security reasons.

Amazing – convicted of 20 counts cause some powerful
(in title only) need to hide their cowardly acts. Fundamentally ridiculous.
However, acts committed by Wall Street… aiding and abetting the enemy directly by laundering money, aiding and abetting by undermining our economy, aiding and abetting by removing constitutional rights, aiding and abetting the enemy via high crimes and misdemeanors – – guess it does not make a squat of difference to the financial elite’s aiders and abettors – our congress. Why they can never admit this. Why? cause they are cowards.

I want to express my warmest gratitude, purityspell@gmail.com I’ll never ever forget all the happiness you gave me. No one can ever imagine how empty and lonely i was without Jay in my life but you brought him back to me and made me a woman, all thanks to you.
Monica Fay.